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Printer-friendly versionKeynote Address: The 21st Annual Steven A. Marquez Journalism Conference
Presented by the Daily Pennsylvanian Alumni Association
Presented by the Daily Pennsylvanian Alumni Association
By Anita Sama, CW'73
Jeremy Kahn and Sue Lin Chong asked that I speak about the future of journalism. That's a huge challenge since the future of journalism is now, already happening in newsrooms around the country.
But I'm from USA Today, so I'll try to be brief.
I'd like to touch on the future of journalism in three quick ways, all closely related:
First -- the widest view -- the future of the profession
Second -- slightly more narrow -- the future of print newspapers.
And third, the reason why many of you may be here: your own future as a journalist.
Journalism's future, right now, seems all about technology.
But technology has always had a tremendous impact on delivering information since the days of moveable type. Moving information from one person to another is just simply on the move again.
I'm old enough to remember Xact-o knives trimming the jump from stories and smelly rubber cement attaching new endings. (That's when cut and paste was really cut and paste.)
In my 30-year career, I've seen reporters change from using manual typewriters to electric models to big clunky mainframe computers to desktops and laptops. Now, some of our reporters, at live events... "Blackberry" on deadline.
On the visual side of newsgathering, digital cameras have eliminated the need for chemical dark rooms. All photos are now shot in color. And the new cameras require less light, allowing us to record images we might have missed in the past.
Photographers are also experimenting with hand-held technology to transmit images -- both still and video. In the next wave of cameras, there are likely to be GPS devices recording when and where a photo was taken, adding another layer of information.
Cameras, word processors -- the delivery vehicles may change, but not the cargo.
It's the story. The tale of the human condition. The information that can enlighten or entertain. The facts that function as a monitor of power, like that of the Presidency, the local gas company or a college administration.
It's a complicated world and people need to navigate it with some honest, informed assistance. At least, that's my view of journalism's job. And that part hasn't changed.
The best journalists I know say, "Don't get hung up on the platform, get the story and then figure out the best way to present it."
Once the story is reported, then technology is giving journalists tremendous new opportunities to tell it.
* Newspapers and magazines may still be print, but now can be supplemented and updated with sister web sites.
* On TV, information comes at viewers non-stop on 24-hour cable outlets or on broadcast channels, also with web access.
* Radio is still a player. NPR, by any measure, is a news force to contend with and the Sirius and XM satellite service have a full menu of news choices.
* And now, of course, perhaps most interesting -- and threatening -- to a newspaper audience like this one, readers go online as their primary news source. There, you never run out of space or time. And people love toys. We have Ipods, Treos, Blackberrys. Now, with RSS feeds, news can come already sculpted to fit the audience. (Notice that we're no longer thinking of them as just "readers.")
I get my DP every day, delivered right to my e-mail. But it's still the DP. The information, the style, the soul, if you will, is still there.
The challenge to everyone in the profession today is to retain the soul of journalism, however it is delivered.
And I like to think that it is the quality of thought, and integrity of purpose that characterizes real journalism.
And it is a challenge, especially online, since besides aggregating factual reports, information is often coming in the form of blogs.
A word about blogs and where they fit in the landscape:
They may be journalism, but are they good journalism? They come from the right and left, and sometimes with some commercial agenda. At their worst, they are unfiltered, unedited writing with an axe to grind or just plain dumb.
At best -- they are independent voices or adjuncts to the mainstream having the advantage of a personal voice.
In their purest form, they have no agenda but the truth.
My own paper, USA Today, is experimenting with edited blogs and all sorts of multimedia interactivity. Indeed, we are merging print and online staff and I'm glad for the convergence, because I would like to have a place to work in the next five or ten years.
It's one way of safeguarding the The Future of Newspapers -- which is that second point I wanted to touch.
Do newspapers even have a future? Television didn't kill newspapers in the 1950s as many predicted, but will the internet do it? Circulation is dropping and advertising revenues are declining. So, the industry is reinventing the product and streamlining staff -- (that's sometimes a euphemism for cutting.)
While my paper merged its print and dot.com sides, the Dallas Morning News cut a quarter of its editorial staff and is reassigning resources to its website. The publisher said when he announced buyouts, "Continual change is the new constant in our business." This past spring, the parent company that owns the Dallas paper also cut 50 jobs in its Riverside, California, paper but added 30 new online slots. The story is the same across the country.
It's easy to see why, if newsprint prices are high and readers are increasingly getting their news elsewhere anyway.
Especially young readers. One survey shows that in the 1970s when I was here on campus, about 50 percent of college-age kids read newspapers. Now that figure has sunk to about 20 percent. Since 18 to 35 year olds can get information free electronically, why would they want to pay for a printed version? Or even walk out of the Quad to get it. So newspapers are addressing the cost and convenience issue. Free tabs are everywhere including New York and Washington, aimed at younger readers in a hurry.
We'll see if that works. And while we are at it, maybe the broadsheet format generally is on its way out. I don't think I would be surprised to see that.
Phil Meyer, a professor at UNC, in his recent book The Vanishing Newspaper predicts that the last printed paper will be read in 2043.
I'm not sure if I believe that. The human love affair with words on paper at the breakfast table or on the subway may win out at least in some form.
If any of you are in Wharton, there is a tremendous opportunity here. Come up with a business plan that will save the printed page. Privately-owned papers that are content with relatively low profit margins, like the one in Spokane, Washington are often held up as good examples. Other papers are looking to local investors who want to keep the community paper alive.
I'm especially intrigued by the suggestion Meyer made a few years ago in which he held up National Public Radio as a financial model, with subscriber support and foundation and corporate sponsors. Certainly there may be some problems with that, but it can be argued that it would be no worse than advertisers trying to influence or investors bleeding profits out of publicly traded newspapers now? I'm sure you are aware of the forced sale and break up of the Knight Ridder group since the Philadelphia Inquirer was involved.
Maybe you are already working for the newspaper of the future. A solid print product, with a well done corresponding website on an independent, non-profit financial footing. Sounds like the DP.
Whatever the physical and fiscal shape of the new newspaper, it will need new journalists, trained in the mechanics of information gathering, open to innovation but dedicated to the ethical culture many of us have worked to create and preserve.
So that brings me to Your Future in Journalism.
If you train to be only a print journalist, I can't vouch for your being continuously employed. The Miami Herald, for example, is redefining every newsroom job to include web responsibility. Leonard Downie at The Washington Post has told his staff to become "platform-agnostic," borrowing a computer term that basically says, think about material that works on any technology from ink to bits.
But how do you get to where you want to go in this climate of change? Heaven knows, the best minds are trying to figure out the answer to that question.
The Carnegie Corporation of New York, along with the Knight Foundation has pulled together news industry leaders and academics from Columbia, Medill, USC, Berkeley, Harvard, and other universities to look at media trends and towards improving the education of journalists. I believe that Penn's Kathleen Hall Jamieson was a participant in one of the early meetings.
Other initiatives are popping up. Just a few weeks ago, the University of Maryland Journalism School announced the creation of its Knight Institute for the Future of Journalism. The stated goal: to work to ensure that journalism retains its professional values and watchdog principles as it evolves.
An academic approach is one way and some of you might choose grad school, but few journalists I know dispute the fact that the best education isn't just confined to the classroom but occurs every day, with every story, on a college paper or on the first job out of school. This is a career, which by definition almost, allows you to learn something new every day. And that works in your favor as you plot a career.
The last, best hope for traditional, serious, mainstream journalism seems to be the journalist's ability to cut through the clutter of information.
In the year 2000, there were estimates that said people were generating annually, two exabytes of data -- that was two quintillion bites of information -- and that was 6 years ago. Besides books and magazines competing for attention, there are, in the US alone, about 1,700 daily and 6,800 weekly newspapers. Some have web sites and some outlets, like Salon and others, operate independently. Add to that 13,000 radio stations and an estimated 28 million blogs that have appeared since the late 1990s.
Who will help people sieve that information stream? Some of us hope it will still be the mainstream media, building on a track record of evenhanded reporting and analysis.
How can you be part of that? If the future of news is going to be making sense of information coming in from all directions, it is going to have to be about context and content -- how you can connect and frame your stories, on whatever platform people experience them.
To do that, at least at first, you might think of developing a broad working knowledge of political science, economics, law, statistics, history and some popular culture. If this sounds like a solid liberal arts education, so be it.
Interviewing and writing is only the last stage. Add a healthy dose of skepticism and critical thinking and of course, a curious nature -- though I'm not sure if that can be learned if it's not part of your make-up.
Acquiring all this is a tall order? Sure.
How? Read, listen, ask, go online, absorb as much as you can so you are prepared to ask the right question and explain the answer. Wrangle yourself an internship so you spend some time with professionals and see what's going on from the inside.
If I were beginning my career today, I'd get some new tools:
* Like a deep understanding of the Net and its potential, maybe learn web design and HTML
* Master computer-assisted reporting and understand statistical analysis. There are stories hidden in numbers. My paper recently did a special report on campus fires that was textbook database reporting
* Think about each story's potential for audio and video as well as text. Just a few weeks ago, we did a story on a high school program in Baltimore for kids in danger of dropping out. The writing was terrific and we sent a videographer along with the reporter on his second visit so we could post video on our web site. It took a lot of planning and coordination but both platforms worked together and the total package -- on paper and on our dotcom site -- was a knockout.
But I wouldn't lose sight of the some of the old shoe-leather skills:
* Learn to file a Freedom of Information request and learn other watchdog techniques.
* Develop your own passion into content expertise.
* And don't forget how to tell individual stories, with narrative lines and polished prose.
As a journalist in the future, you will have lots of company. With the web, everyone has access to publication, not just the guy -- or the company -- that owns the press. The tremendous potential for interactivity makes journalism wide open.
I'm thinking particularly of the concept of citizen journalism (or network journalism or social journalism) -- the idea of enlisting net users to be whistleblowers and watchdogs. It's a natural outgrowth of the interactive potential of new media.
Professional journalists can't be everywhere at once and the idea of a tip is an old, valued tool. I used to answer a city desk phone in Westchester County New York and tips came that way.
An NYU professor just got a hundred thousand dollars from Reuters to test his experiment, called New Assignment.net. Watch for its launch early next year.
In the next six months, USA Today will be exploring ways to tap into its own audience and we are already talking about ways to make this work.
There is no longer one kind of journalist; now the choices are many. Take a hard look at the kind you are. Not everyone thrives on the adrenaline of a deadline a day or every hour. Maybe you are a more thoughtful, reflective sort, maybe you develop expertise to the point that you narrow your sights to one field in a specialist journal or one geographic area. One of the biggest growth areas in interactive journalism is at the hyperlocal level -- a town or suburb that's been underserved in the past.
Check with a trusted mentor who has seen you work. With the field exploding in many different directions, there are lots of ways to go: visual journalism, niche publications -- for scientists, educators, even journalism for journalists, like American Journalism Review and Columbia Journalism Review.
There will always be a need for credible information, precise reporting and I like to think there are those who still see journalism as a mission, not just a career.
By they way, you probably won't get rich doing this, but I can promise you rarely a dull day, immersed in a culture of learning, participating in a satisfying career that might just make a difference.
Whatever you do when you leave Penn, prepare to change because the profession is changing. If you take your Penn education -- the beauty of language you picked up in Bennett Hall or the economic awareness you learned in this building -- combine it with your DP experience, a sense of values and maybe grad school, you can train your brain to be nimble and continue to change, then you, like journalism will have a future.